Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.

It is not the motive, properly speaking, that determines the working of the will; but it is the will that imparts strength to the motive. As Coleridge says: " It is the man that makes the motive, and not the motive the man."

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949), p. 12. This is the opening sentence of his essay, "The Scientist", first published in The Smart Set, August 1919.

The plea of good intentions is not one that can be allowed to have much weight in passing historical judgment upon a man whose wrong-headedness and distorted way of looking at things produced, or helped to produce, such incalculable evil; there is a wide political applicability in the remark attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect that he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot him on purpose, but that he would surely never forgive one who did so accidentally.

Men's minds are as variant as their faces. Where the motives of their actions are pure, the operation of the former is no more to be imputed to them as a crime, than the appearance of the latter; for both, being the work of nature, are alike unavoidable.

. . . The fallacious use of the principle that you cannot look into a man's mind. It is said you cannot do that: therefore what follows? It is said that you are to have fixed rules to tell you that he must have meant something, one way or the other, when certain exterior phenomena arise. The answer is that there is no such thing as an absolute criterion which gives you certain index to a man's mind. There is nothing outside his mind which is an absolute indication of what is going on inside. So far from saying that you cannot look into a man's mind, you must look into it, if you are going to find fraud against him: and unless you think you see what must have been in his mind, you cannot find him guilty of fraud.

A man acting for himself may indulge his own caprices, and consider what is convenient or agreeable to himself, as well as what is strictly prudent, and his prudential motives cannot afterwards be separated from the others which may have governed him.

Lord Langdale, M.R., Att.-Gen. v. Kerr (1840), 2 Beav. 428.

Motives are very often immaterial with reference to the manner of disposing of a suit. It has been said by an eminent Judge, that if you were to look into motives of suitors, Courts of justice would not sit above a month in the year, and would have little to do. Of course there are, in numerous instances, motives for litigation which, if they could be looked into, would prevent a Court of justice from interfering. But generally I agree that it is not the rule so to regard them.

The rule of our law is that the immediate cause, the causa proxima, and not the remote cause, is to be looked at: for, as Lord Bacon says: "It were infinite for the law to judge the causes of causes and their impulsions one of another; therefore it contenteth itself with the immediate cause, and judgeth of acts by that, without looking to any further degree."

I think the motives of the legislature in passing an Act of Parliament are to be taken to be proper motives.

Bayley, J., King v. Hunt (1820), 1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 312.

It was by no means uncommon, where the legislature had a particular object in view in making a particular statute, to extend the enactments beyond the immediate and original object, and apply it to other matter suggested by it.